


Lizard

by hello_imasalesman



Category: Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: Gen, Lester-centric, North Yankton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-28 21:03:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3869692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hello_imasalesman/pseuds/hello_imasalesman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One went down. One went to prison. One escaped. But what about Lester Crest?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lizard

**Author's Note:**

> I always wondered, when M fucks up with Madrazo, he tells Franklin:  
> M: Look, I only know one way to make money. I’m going to have to give an old friend a call. Lester. I think he’s in town somewhere. Might have to track him down. Just give me a little alone time.
> 
> So how did he know Lester was around? This is a fic of me trying to figure that out.

There’s something off about this job. Things are going too smoothly. They’re casing the joint but everything just seems… off. Too easy. Lester had felt the hairs on the back of his neck prick when Michael had driven them slowly around, tried to scope out where they were coming in. The guards seemed obvious. The alarm’s passcode was tricky, but only as if someone had _purposefully_ encrypted the code in a way to make it seem challenging. And that wasn’t Lester’s boorish self-confidence in his technological skills. There was something wrong. It was a precocious notion of what a real bank heist should be like, what it should have been if they were in the movies.

“Seems like the plan’s all good. I like it. Get in, get out.” Michael barely gave a sideways glance at the pictures Lester had pinned up on the corkboard. His neck twitched. He rolled his shoulders.

Trevor’s eyed it more fully, running greasy fingers over all of Lester’s hard work, the blueprints he had found, pictures from a coat pocket on what the inside of the bank looked like. “Yeah, good job, you gimpy genius. This is gonna be a walk in the park.”

“I don’t think this will be a wise choice.”

All eyes turned to Lester. He cleared his throat.

“Everything seems… very _clean._ Too clean. There’s something off.”

“You’re doubting yourself, Lest. It seems great. You even got us a helicopter and all.” Michael offered, almost half-hearted. Trevor’s eyes darted over, and he growled.

“Fuck, better than great. Christ, Mikey. You lettin’ that family make you even softer? This is a solid fuckin’ plan. Almost as good as the Big One, y’know, just a steppin’ stone up to greatness.” Trevor took an aggressive step towards Michael, “The haul on this one’s gonna be huge and we’re going out in style in a chopper, and you’re getting limp-dick on me now?”

All it took was the mustachioed Canadian redneck and Michael was suddenly bristling and snorting like a bull: “I’m sorry I’m not shooting my load here over stealing cash like a fuckin’ teenage hedonist—“

“Aw, you learn that big of a word in one of your daytime movie marathons, sittin’ on your fat ass in your picket fence trailer with your wife?”

“Fuck off, Trevor, sorry that something consisting of more than three syllables is giving you such a fuckin’ complex.”

They were nose to nose, Trevor’s palms resting dangerously on Michael’s chest. If he pushed, Michael would lash out with over the top levels of retaliation; a swinging fist, grabbing of the lapels. Blood would be spilled in his home and so help him, Lester was not in the mood to coddle children and grab the borax to scrub out incriminating stains.

“Enough!” Lester’s voice rose shrilly, cracking somewhat. Trevor and Michael’s eyes and bodies did not disengage, but at the very least, they fell quiet. “Enough, you two. This isn’t about _you_.” He jabbed a finger at them. He wasn’t dumb. Trevor wasn’t defending his plan because he thought it was that damn lofty, even with the addition of him getting to possibly fly a helicopter. “This is about the fact that… that there’s something wrong--”

“There’s _nothing FUCKING wrong_.” Trevor growled low in his throat, pushing his forehead up against Michael’s. Michael stood firm. Their eyes still hadn’t left each other’s glower.

Lester’s face turned sour, the knuckles of the hand wrapped around his cane going white. “I’m washing my hands of this.” At that, the two men swiveled on their points. Lester had never given up so absolutely before. “You two already have everything; the plans, the bomb, the helicopter is all set.” He turned his face to the corkboard, adjusting his glasses. “But at this point, I’m out.”

Suddenly, as if self-conscious, Michael pulled away from Trevor. The other man simply grunted. “Lester, but… man. We’re counting on you. Me, ‘n Trevor, Brad—“

“No, Michael. I’m done.”

Trevor was sulking in the back, hands shoved in the pockets of his coat, facing the plans on the board. “Fuck it. You ain’t gettin’ a cut, then.”

Michael’s eyes hadn’t left Lester. His knees shook slightly, and with an annoyed sigh he teetered with pained steps to a chair and sat, heavily, under Michael’s strange gaze. “Just… call me when you two are finished.”

They left. Lester couldn’t shake that feeling in the pit of his stomach, or the guttural tones in Trevor’s voice. He wasn’t as dumb as Brad, he didn’t have Michael’s familial connections and he certainly wasn’t going to martyr himself like Trevor would inevitably do, all in the name of a _rush._ He immediately took his things and packed up all the necessaries after the two of them left (his computer towers, signed copy of _Righteous Slaughter 3,_ SIM cards, his favorite stacks of pornography, collapsible walker, and his stock portfolio) and bought a train ticket, in cash, destination up somewhere in the Washington area.

His paranoia had always kept him alive, and despite how intelligent he was and how logical his field of work demanded him to be, Lester never refused to listen to his reptilian brain when it would go into fight or flight mode. It always hissed, _run_ , and saved him countless times before. Sure, Michael and Trevor would laugh and swing their dicks around like the gorillas they were, but Lester had never done time for his crimes.

His chunky laptop balanced on the small train table and his phone on his knee, Lester waited. The helicopter never came. It got intercepted before it had even left, according to the police radio blathering into his earpiece, though they were careful in not mentioning _why_ they hadn’t allowed the vehicle to take off.

Lester imagined he knew what was happening before the others did. At least, before Trevor and Brad did. He wasn’t _sure_ if Michael wanted to bring him down also, and give the pigs two gunman and a hacker, but he wasn’t taking chances. If the FIB came, they would find abandoned monitors and posters hanging limply from the walls. A bare mattress and the magazines that wouldn’t fit in his duffel. He imagined they would have gunned for them fist, however, he heard nothing of his place being raided. No sign, according to his video cameras he was viewing over his own personal encrypted hot spot, of cars waiting outside. If they had thought he was a part of it, they would have gone for him first, cut the informant out from the get-go.

In the corner of his screen, a line went alive. The phone was used; the bomb, then, detonated, he assumed. It wouldn’t have called if it had been shot by police fire, or crushed under the weight of brute men tackling as the screams of “Keep your hands where we can see them,” filled the vault.

Lester’s leg bounced. He glanced down at his phone.

_“10-4, we’re heading towards the National Bank of North Yankton.”_

His eyes flitted across the screen of his computer, the reflection of words in his glasses.

_“We have a reading. Two cars are heading northbound, hot, do you copy? We need backup.”_

_“Repeat, we have a reading. We’re being told that they’re heading towards the tracks. 657, do you copy?”_

_“689, please be advised, armed and dangerous.”_

_“I repeat, 657, do you copy?”_

_“660, they’ve cleared the tracks, please be advised the vehicle was clipped and will be stopping. Move up from the location of the helicopter.”_

_“Snipers are in position.”_

_“Let’s not get fancy with head shots, here. Go for the body. Let’s neutralize as soon as possible.”_

He glanced down at his phone. His lizard brain screamed. The police radio did not cease.

_“One down.”_

_“Second down.”_

_“The third one is on the run. I repeat—identified as male, Caucasian, shoulder length brown hair, armed and highly dangerous.”_

Lester’s phone did not ring.

A month later, Lester surveyed the corkboard in his new home. Three large pictures, with names scribbled underneath. One went down. One went to prison. One escaped.

Brad Snider was deceased. There was no further trace of him after the heist. There was no death certificate, either, and no trial if he had still been alive. And Snider was certainly not the Caucasian, shoulder-length brown hair that had managed to tromp with snow soaking through their boots and blood on their lips through fields and fields of white. There was nothing underneath his picture, only the absence of things—no listing of his death, no John Does with even similar body features in the morgues on that day. No prison records.

Trevor had disappeared, initially. Like Brad, there was no death certificate or trial. But unlike Brad-- Lester had to begrudgingly, and frightfully, admit-- Trevor would never accept going down in such a fashion. He was like a Canadian Rasputin; he would need to be shot down in a helicopter, caught in an explosion, some sort of epic crossfire where he was high off some pig-shit slurry of drugs, more than a simple shootout. He would not be caught in the woods and the snow once the police had lost track of him; that was his territory.

Like a wounded animal, he left a trail of blood. Lester’s old home had been repossessed, of course, once the mortgage payments stopped coming in and they realized it had only ever been under a fake name to begin with, and they gutted it mostly clean and took down the more obvious cameras. Trevor must have scared the hell out of the nice family that had moved in, with their two very attractive teenage daughters, yowling outside like a wounded animal. He knew, even for Trevor, it had been a stupid, stupid moment of weakness for the man; bedraggled, under the influence of _something_ , he had been caught on his cameras pacing in front of Lester’s old house. On the corkboard, the police radio’s description was pinned. Underneath that was a screenshot of him with what looked like saran wrap around his neck, staring up with reflective white eyes like an animal caught at the camera. He ran away when the lights went on.

And Michael Townley, well. He died, and had a nice funeral, in a casket that held a body that was smaller than Townley’s. A man named Dave Norton took the credit for taking down one of North Yankton’s most notorious criminal masterminds (and, even though he would have never wanted to be publically known, Lester rolled his eyes at the _mastermind_ that emblazoned the majority of the headlines he clipped.) in all of the newspapers and television six o’clock news stories. He was promoted, and then moved right out to sunny Los Santos. He bought two houses, one under a pseudonym. That took more finagling, and pulling a few strings with contacts out on that coast.

The papers were tacked roughly up on the board, highlighted, poured over. Underneath it, the cover of a tweeny-bopper magazine quickly torn was pinned, which was addressed to a Tracey De Santa. Someone had accessed the hidden bank accounts that Lester had set up for the three of them (and still kept a watchful eye over.), under false pseudonyms and in different countries. Trevor and Brad’s had been frozen and assets seized. But, curiously, Michael’s did not. In fact, more money was accumulated. Lester printed and pinned up a transfer, to a certain Dave Norton.

Lester’s lizard brain retched, and shook, and screamed. But Michael hadn’t given him up yet—or, they just hadn’t been able to find him. The first few months were the worst. And then a year went by. Technology changed. Lester kept tabs on them all, quietly, cocooned himself up in his encryptions and proxies, kept himself busy with other people and other jobs. He watched Trevor move back South. He tracked the first letter sent to Brad, and shook his head when the FIB kept sending letters back, letters that were not simply stamped RETURN TO SENDER. He watched Michael fester, and the bank account that had become swollen with Trevor and Brad’s accounts deplete at an impressively fast rate. More _Righteous Slaughter_ games came out.

He never told anyone that Michael was still alive; and in return, Michael never said his name, as he scoured FIB wanted lists at both the public and encrypted level.

At some point, Lester returned back to his hometown, for some reason or another. He hadn’t ever _wanted_ to return to Los Santos, and certainly never even step foot in San Fierro after what had happened in Silicon Valley. He had told the two of them, bundled in snowbanks and hard liquor, how much he hated the sun, and the sand, the preppy smiles and the beautiful slim people with their working bodies they baked in the sun.

He was mildly amused at the thought that Michael was living nearby. He wasn’t sure if he would ever hear from him again; he kept inside, like usual. Brad was still dead. He had lost Trevor somewhere in Arizona, where there was a small drug and armaments trade, and then it went cold. He kept the cellphone number, from so many years ago, active. Just in case.


End file.
